ABSTRACT

Cashew nuts(Anacardium occidentale) represent the
second largest agricultural export in Benin (second only to cotton). The
country is the 6th world best cashew nuts producer and the 2nd best of West
Africa. There is recent and strong increase in the international demand of
cashew products. Therefore cashew crops appear to be a strategic product which
Benin is looking forward developing.

This study was carried out to provide baseline information to
improve the commercialization of cashew nut in the Atacora and Donga provinces.

We surveyed a total of 160 cashew nut producers and traders in
Kouandé and Djougou districts. In each town 40 producers and 40 traders,
were randomly selected. We used Structure-Conduite-Proformance approach to
analyse our data with support from ÷2
test, Kendall test, Student t test and one-way ANOVA.

The actors of cashew nut marketing system in the study region
were: producers, collectors, middlemen, wholesalers, exporters and processors
whose activity is still underdevelopped.

The ÷2 test
indicated that the type of actor is depended of age, sex, level of education
and ethnicity. However, the majority of actors are locals while the wholesalers
are foreigners. Most of the collectors and middlemen are youngsters while women
were specifically involved in the collection and processing of cashew nuts.

The trading system network of cashew nuts is still unofficial
and commercialization is carried out in precarious conditions.

The costs and margins of cashew nuts trading vary a lot
between actors both at town and province levels. In the two provinces,
wholesalers support most of the higher costs with an average of 48.7F/kg per
wholesaler. A comparison of averages between actors of two towns revealed that
producers of Djougou support lower costs with an average of 33.15 F/kgs per
producer whereas collectors, middlemen and wholesalers of this town supported
the most elevated costs than those of Kouandé. Producers and wholesalers
of Kouandé had higher margins than their counterparts of Djougou. 52,08%
of the profits generated by the system come back to tradesmen against 47,92%
for the producers.

The trading system of cashew nuts is profitable for all of the
actors but the efficiency of the trade varied from one actor to another.
Wholesalers, unlike the oher actors, had an efficient commercialization.

Overall, some factors negatively affects the developpement of
the cashew nut trading system in the study areas, namely the weak finacing of
the system, difficulty to maintain plantations, low and unstable price to
producers, the high number of middlemen and fraud. This study suggested
strategies to address these issues in the Atacora and Donga province and Benin.